VIENNA, July 10 Silent Circle, a company known
for mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, is
introducing a fixed price, secrecy-cloaking service on Thursday
that lets customers make and receive private phone calls.

The secure voice-and-data calling plan works on Apple iOS
and Android smartphones and, eventually, on Windows Mobile
systems, the company said. Callers can reach 79 countries,
including China, Russia, most of Europe and the Americas. Large
parts of the Middle East and Africa are not covered.

The service aims to challenge not just traditional phone
carriers - who still by and large charge steep roaming fees to
international travelers - but also to newer, voice-over-Internet
services that have sprung up over the past decade.

For while Silent Circle undercuts major competitors' roaming
costs in many countries, the service's basic attraction lies in
its security features.

"What Silent Circle is offering is an augmented level of
security beyond what normal phones can offer," said Ben Wood, a
senior analyst with mobile research firm CCS Insight. "It
captures the zeitgeist in terms of paranoia by answering the
question of what more consumers can do to protect themselves."

The offering looks to appeal to international business
travellers working with sensitive information including
executives, lawyers and bankers, as well as journalists or
activists aiming to fend off prying eyes and unwanted listeners
in an age of growing criminal, state-sponsored, corporate
espionage and Internet-wide privacy threats.

While no one is immune to such snooping, Silent Circle
offers users a means of encrypted communications that also
disposes of records of all calls, texts, messages or documents
on both senders' and receivers' devices. This "burn" feature
auto-deletes sent messages and attachments at pre-set times.

"Any drug dealer, terrorist or pimp who thinks this sort of
service will insulate them would have to be naïve," Wood said.
"Nothing is bullet-proof in that regard."

But some security experts see the software as one of the
best commercial options available to individuals, businesses and
even government workers, albeit one without absolute guarantees
of anonymity or the capacity to withstand targeted surveillance.

"It all depends on what your threat profile is," said the
Geneva-based company's chief operations officer, Vic Hyder, a
former U.S. Navy SEAL officer. "Most people out there will
understand that it's the best security I can have and that's
good enough."

BUBBLE OF PRIVACY

Silent Circle was founded by security expert Mike Janke,
another former Navy SEAL, along with Internet encryption creator
Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, inventor of Apple's whole disk
encryption system.

The new calling plan starts at $12.95 a month for 100
minutes of outbound calls and runs up to $39.95 for 1,000
minutes of calling, comparable to premium price plans offered by
Internet communications services such as Microsoft's
Skype and Rakuten's Viber - but with greater security.

Customers receive a personal, 10-digit phone number from one
of 26 countries that they can use to receive calls when
travelling. Calls can be received from anywhere in the world at
the calling party's standard long-distance rates.

The plan charges outbound calls that Silent Circle members
make to non-Circle members - anyone with a landline phone in the
79 countries covered by the plan and the 42 countries where
mobile phone users are reachable.

Outbound calls provide what Hyder calls "a bubble of
encryption" that conceals the contents of a call as it is
transmitted to Silent Circle servers in Canada and Switzerland,
before it is then sent out to public phone networks.

In June, the company also started shipping its first mobile
phones. The "Blackphone" comes loaded with a customised version
of the Android operating system known as PrivateOS along with a
suite of security and privacy apps from Silent Circle.

Hyder said KPN in the Netherlands and Telcel in
Mexico, a unit of Carlos Slim's America Movil, were in
the early stages of testing the phones for possible mass market
retail sales starting later this year or early in 2015.
(Editing by Georgina Prodhan and Tom Pfeiffer)

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, Dec 9 U.S. President-elect
Donald Trump on Friday was expected to name a senior Goldman
Sachs banker to coordinate economic policy across his
administration, turning again to Wall Street for expertise in
managing the world's largest economy.

Dec 9 A former Cantor Fitzgerald trader has been
indicted on charges that he defrauded investors by lying about
the price of mortgage bond transactions he handled for them
after the financial crisis, U.S. prosecutors said on Friday.

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